pittsburgh

A walkway to the Allegheny River in Pittsburgh, under the David L. Lawrence Convention Center.

I was at the Convention Center for the Pet Expo over the weekend, and when I left Saturday night after a long day, I heard water and thought it was raining. As it turns out, there was an area to drive through between the two sides of the building, and this pathway between the lanes with a waterfall, the water flowing down the vertical walls then down the stepped area next to the walkway, lit with magenta lights. It was totally enchanting! This couple had also been taking photos, one figure walking all the way down below the catwalk I was standing on, then walking back up to the person taking photos.

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For a print of any photo, visit “purchasing” for availability and terms. For photos of lots of black cats and other cats—and even some birds as I first published this post there—visit The Creative Cat.

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Well, I was stuck in traffic on a lovely autumn day, so I took a photo through the windshield. But it’s typical Pittsburgh, a suspension bridge, a steep hill covered with trees and peppered with houses, a few churches in various denominations mixed in, incredible clouds and a lovely blue above, plus you know there’s a river in there somewhere. Pittsburgh is a lovely city but on a day like yesterday it’s breathtaking.

I wish my travels had allowed me to safely take a few other photos, but you can’t just stop in the middle of traffic, let the camera focus and click a few times without some difficulty in traffic flow. I passed no fewer than five major universities and an international teaching hospital, probably a dozen or more national historic sites and the headweaters of the Ohio River, to name a few things, plus dozens of distinct neighborhoods.

I just wonder who got up there and painted the dinosaurs on the rigging.

It’s the 10th Street Bridge that connects downtown Pittsburgh with the South Side.

“Three Birds in Flight” by sculptor Mary Callery has soared through the multi-story entrance to the Regional Enterprise Tower in Pittsburgh for 60 years.

This building was once called Alcoa Tower, housing the home offices of the Aluminum Company of America, or ALCOA, and the building is faced with aluminum. This sculpture was made from 700 pounds of aluminum and was installed in the lobby when the Alcoa Tower was opened in 1953. Callery was born in New York but grew up in Pittsburgh, traveling to Europe and settling in France. She returned to the United States during WWII and later returned to France. Among many other sculptures in her life’s work, she was commissioned to create three sculptures in aluminum for the Alcoa Tower, “Three Birds in Flight” being one of them. I am honored to have a sculpture by such a renowned artist in our city, and I find it interesting that in an era when female artists were not taken seriously ALCOA chose to commission a woman to create its signature welcoming sculptures.

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It could have been a scene from a century ago at the J&L Steel plant along the Monongahela River, but it’s just a foggy October morning.

A spectacularly foggy morning, the type that only autumn provides. This is a bend in the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh, the bit of a bridge you see is the Birmingham Bridge from the South Side Flats to the Boulevard of the Allies in the Lower Hill/Uptown/South Oakland. The steam rises from a concrete plant on Second Avenue, on the river’s edge, where the J&L Plant once stood; in the distance you see the first of the buildings in Oakland leading to Carlow University, Chatham University, the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. In this fog, this could have been taken decades ago, representing the smog from the mills. The mills are gone, the air and the rivers are relatively clean, but the colleges, the neighborhoods, the essence of Pittsburgh is still there in the rolling fog of an October morning.

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For a print of any photo, visit “purchasing” for availability and terms. For photos of lots of black cats and other cats—and even some birds as I first published this post there—visit The Creative Cat.

Great view! On a bluff above the Allegheny River just across from downtown Pittsburgh, these colorful old houses looks like a little street somewhere in Europe, which is pretty much what it was patterned after.

But I couldn’t decide which was better—the row of houses, or the view of the whole scene, sky, houses, hillside, river and all.

Troy Hill, Pittsburgh

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For a print of any photo, visit “purchasing” for availability and terms. For photos of lots of black cats and other cats—and even some birds as I first published this post there—visit The Creative Cat.

The duck is in Pittsburgh, floating on the Allegheny River right by the Point, where the Allegheny and Monongahela converge to create the Ohio River. And as the artist Florentijn Hofman said of the project, people have come together to look, to talk and to engage opinions. Considering the multitude of cultures in this city between the universities, high-tech companies and the health care industry, it also achieves his goal of bringing world cultures together.

Also, each city the duck visits builds its own duck. Our duck was fabricated by an inflatables company in Ohio, and the pontoon structure was made just north of Pittsburgh in Newcastle.

People gather around the duck.

Especially on rivers that were once sludgy with pollution Hofman’s point of our global waters being our bathtub is well taken. How many people know where their water comes from? How many people in Pittsburgh know our water comes from our three rivers? We do indeed bathe in this river, and the substances we drain into it flows downstream for others to use as their bathtub after us.

Below, in the city that gave us Mister Rogers, it’s just a beautiful day in the neighborhood, with a big yellow rubber ducky on the river. Read more in the Post-Gazette.

A view of Pittsburgh from a distance up the Allegheny River at twilight. On the left is a portion of the city, on the right the angled red line on the hill is the Duquesne Incline from Mt. Washington down to Carson Street along the Ohio River. Straight ahead are three bridges too dark to distinguish and under them the Point where the Allegheny and Monongahela meet and form the Ohio.

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For a print of any photo, visit “purchasing” for availability and terms. For photos of lots of black cats and other cats—and even some birds as I first published this post there—visit The Creative Cat.

This castle turret may think it’s convincing people that it surrounds a moat, but the fire hydrant kind of gives it away, and the gas station across the street.

This is the far corner of Allegheny Cemetery in Lawrenceville, established in 1844, at the corner of Stanton Avenue and Butler Street. It gave me a good laugh as I sat at the light.

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For a print of any photo, visit “purchasing” for availability and terms. For photos of lots of black cats and other cats—and even some birds as I first published this post there—visit The Creative Cat.

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Lots and lots of ladies’ dresses hanging in, of all places, the Strip District in Pittsburgh. Do we strip and try them on? No, it’s just the original strip of wholesale warehouses for all sorts of produce and dry goods. And ladies’ dresses.

I applied the “poster edges” filter to achieve the vibrance and contrast from the original scene; I had to take the photo through my car window.

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For a print of any photo, visit “purchasing” for availability and terms. For photos of lots of black cats and other cats—and even some birds as I first published this post there—visit The Creative Cat.

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Imagine having a little free lending library in your front yard, the one below is in front of the Animal Nature pet supply store, both in Regent Square, in Pittsburgh. Stock it with books, encourage others to borrow one and return it when they’re done, just like a regular lending library but no library cards and all built on trust. Find a steward and purchase one of the little shelters, then add books. Read more at Little Free Library.